I've used with great success prompts like "when implementing this feature, did you encounter sections of code that were needlessly complex, that were making it hard for you to work? what would you change in the design/architecture to make it leaner?"
You forgot the premise of the article and why the proposed solutions were not good. It was not the complexity of a solution: they were simple fast fixes like a tape on a leak, but the hacky tape they were.
(of course I tried, the code after “refactor” is still shit unless you start going very explicit about it at a point of being better and faster of doing it yourself)
this is what separates real engineers which solve hard problems, adapt and overcome, versus the ones which complain that whatever they have access to is not perfect and so they will give up on it because "its unusable"